REUTERS
Sonali Mukherjee, 27, sits in a room temporarily offered by a Sikh temple during an interview in New Delhi July 22, 2012. PHOTO/Reuters
NEW DELHI: They came in the dead of night, broke into her home as she slept and poured a cocktail of acids over her face — burning her skin, melting her eyelids, nose, mouth and ears, and leaving her partially deaf and almost blind. Her crime? She had spurned their sexual advances.
Nine years on, Sonali Mukherjee, 27, is appealing to the Indian government for medical support for skin reconstructive surgery as well as tougher penalties on her three assailants, who were released on bail after only three years in prison.
Either that, she says, or authorities should give her the right to kill herself. Euthanasia is illegal in India.
“For the last nine years, I am suffering … living without hope, without future. If I don’t have justice or my health, my only way out is to die,” she says, sitting on a bed in a sparsely furnished room above a Sikh temple in south Delhi.
“I don’t want to live half a life, with half a face.”
Sonali’s desperate plea highlights the heinous crime of throwing acid on women in India, the lack of support for victims, and lax laws which have allowed attackers to get away with what activists say is the equivalent of murder.
Acid violence – where acid is intentionally thrown to maim, disfigure or blind – occurs in many countries across the world, and is most common in Cambodia, as well as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India where deep-rooted patriarchy persists.
Around 1,500 acid attacks are reported globally each year, with 80 percent of them on women, says London-based charity, Acid Survivors Trust International, adding this is a gross under-estimate as most victims are scared to speak out.
There is no official statistics for India, but a study conducted by Cornell University in January 2011 said there were 153 attacks reported in the media from 1999 to 2010.
Many of these attacks, said the study, are acts of revenge because a woman spurns sexual advances or rejects a marriage proposal.
“These men feel so insulted that a woman could turn them down and have an attitude of ‘If I can’t have you, no one can’,”
says Sushma Kapoor, deputy director for UN Women in South Asia.
ISOLATED AND DISFIGURED
With a bright future ahead of her, Sonali was a 17-year-old sociology student in the city of Dhanbad in India’s central state of Jharkhand when the attack happened back in April 2003.
Dawn for more